Book description
From his first job scraping trays at a pizzeria at the age of
fifteen, Jason Sheehan has worked at all kinds of restaurants across
America, from Buffalo to Tampa to Albuquerque: at a French colonial
and an all-night diner, at a crab shack just off the interstate and a
fusion restaurant in a former hair salon. In Cooking Dirty he tells
the story of one man's addiction to the urgency, stress, and adrenalin
of minimum-wage kitchen work. His universe becomes 'a small, steel box
filled with knives and meat and fire', where the kitchen is a
fraternity with its own rites and initiations: cigarettes in the
walk-in freezer, sex in the basement, drugs everywhere. Restaurant
cooking sets a series of seemingly endless personal challenges, from
the first perfectly done mussel to the satisfaction of surgically
sliced foie gras. The kitchen itself is a place in which life's
mysteries are thawed, sliced, broiled, barbecued, and fried - a place
where people from the margins find their community and their calling.
Cooking Dirty is a passionate, funny, electrifying memoir of
addiction: an addiction to kitchen work. It reveals the hell and glory
of restaurant life, as told by a survivor. Jason Sheehan is his own
unforgettable central character - edgy, driven, irresistible. Eating
out will never be the same again.
